Tinworm-wings: All change

Friday, 22 August 2008

All change

Last night, ringing a friend back home, I felt pretty depressed. My summer holiday is running out quickly and I feel that when I am not flying, which is most of the time (flown three hours in the last two weeks) I am achieving far too little (and you can't study ALL the time). Meanwhile, back home lots isn't getting done that could be....like fitting the leafsprings to the 101, mounting the axles, etc. Ask anyone and they will tell you that I always like to feel I am achieving something in my spare time.

So, I was depressed. The weather, as everyone in the UK knows, has been awful, seemingly for ever....and every day is a round of expectation, disappointment, waiting, disappointment, waiting, waiting, waiting. I told my friend that if the weather didn't change by the weekend, I was going to cancel next week's bookings and go home and get on with stuff which is not weather dependent. I was willing to risk the weather improving while I was away; I'd be philosophical about it.

Another driving factor is my gut which has been crappy, due to a lousy diet (living out of a microwave and eating out)...and I don't think I recovered fully from the bug I had at home. I get little sleep, to be honest, sleeping in the hangar or tent and I am desperate for the comforts of home.

This morning, all changed, following a night of rain crashing down on the hangar roof. The sun was out, the sky clearing and almost no wind.

I FLEW!

Neill and I went on a fantastic flight, with about 15mins spent catching up (I'd got rusty), then we did some advanced turns, engine failures etc and, best of all a landing-out at Pitsford, a small grass strip. Most wonderful of all about this was that I flew the approach and the landing myself, with only verbal prompts.

Neill

It is the most fantastic location: a lake for sailing, an airstrip, a beautiful farm house and massive barns fit for conversion or hangarage. Glorious. The family which owns it is very sympathetic to microlights and very welcoming. Landing fees are voluntary and go towards the Air Ambulance. I regret not having had my wallet with me.

Neill and I took each other's pictures with G-CEGJ with the reservoir in the background, then I took us off back to Sywell, where I did a half decent landing. On the way back we kept a Harvard in sight as it was doing aerobatics...and Neil took some photos for his scrapbook.

That took care of the flying. Cath took care of the comforts of life by suggesting a B&B and I decided to splash out and book four nights in a row next week. It is a luxury I can't afford for a whole month, but under the circumstances......

When I told Neill I was abandoning the hangar for a B&B he said I had crashed in his estimation.....he'd thought I was hardcore! ;)

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Ground handling (how to store an aeroplane at home and get it to the airfield)

A trial flight in a Thruster, when I was 28, c.1991

I have started to learn to fly before...TWICE! First time round I had just graduated and got a job at an aerodrome in Cornwall, where I earned flying hours by fuelling microlights, giving hourly weather reports to the Met office etc. The weather was bad, so there was little flying to be had...and in the end I was paid with broken propellers and bits of crashed fuselage to hang on the wall. The boss was a great bloke called Ian Stokes, who had been a leading light in forming the BMAA and had manufactured Thrusters in the early days . In retirement he moved to The Gambia and became a publican and, shockingly, was murdered this year.

Flying Rogues

ten years on from my first experiences at Moorland Flying School (and now nearly ten years ago) the flying school was under new management and my girlfriend and I booked full courses. We both made good progress initially but never felt we were being moved on and had difficulty pinning the instructor down to signing our logbooks. When another instructor signed himself as P1, we got suspicious, contacted the CAA and were horrified to learn that our instructor did not have a current instructor rating, that we had not been insured and that none of our hours counted towards our licences. We were eventually refunded and the instructors were prosecuted by the CAA.

The very sympathetic CAA investigator spoke to the BMAA on our behalf and my hours have been allowed to count (at the discretion of the school). But in point of fact, I flew way over the minimum number of hours subsequently, so it is really quite academic in the end.

Around 2001 an instructor in Norfolk tried to convince me that if I bought his aeroplane he could teach me at a cut rate, as I'd then be using my own plane. Great idea, I thought, except that it turned out that the aircraft in question had failed a noise test and could not be used from the instructor's field. He later admitted that I would have to learn on his aeroplane at the normal rate. He resisted showing me the paperwork, kept avoiding me and eventually, when it was quite clear I wasn't going to buy without the paperwork, told me to F-off.

So far my experience has been that there are a lot of rogues in flying, which is one reason why I was so very impressed by the professional set-up at Sywell.

by air to Africa

My sister and I were lucky to fly many thousands of miles in the 1960s and '70s in many aircraft types, including BOAC VC-10s, Boeing 707s and even a Nigerian Airways Dakota, as our dad (and later our mum) had teaching posts in Kenya and Nigeria. Those were still the romantic days of flying, when passengers walked across tarmac and up steps, rather than walking down the tubes that have turned passenger flying into a mundane affair. (Mind you, aren't take-offs still incredibly exciting!?)

Back then air hostesses GAVE children the sorts of nick-nacks that their parents have to pay fortunes for from the airline catalogue these days; things like model aeroplanes, keyrings etc. We were also given sweets to help us cope with depressurisation. (And they were hostesses, so nobody give me a hard time)

Mum says that I cracked my first joke when I was small, on a flight out to Kenya, when I said, "Mummy, shouldn't there be a wing on this side of the plane too". Apparently I got her with that one.

At Kano airport I remember standing behind an engine and thinking how hot it still was....and then being told that the engine was cold. The heat was Kano. I got a headache and took several days to aclimatise.

The airport perri-ways at Kano were littered with aircraft that didn't make it, including a burnt-out Mig 15. The Nigerian Airforce flew them and my dad played squash with one of their pilots, Ben, at the Kano Club. I recall a Mig fly-past on my birthday. Was it arranged with Ben over a beer? Was it a pure coincidence?

At Entebbe airport (Uganda) I remember climbing down the steps on to the runway and being encircled by soldiers with machine guns, who then went through all our belongings and confiscated my cherished Swiss Army penknife, purchased on one of numerous European stop-overs. That was in the twitchy time after the Israeli hijacking ...and mum had to stifle my protests.

Before my first flight to Nairobi, as an infant, I was scared stiff. I didn't understand that I wouldn't have to sit astride the fuselage, as I did on my pedalcar! In a funny way, I not only overcame that fear but have come full circle; microlighting is just like sitting on that pedalcar......open to the elements - real flying!